Twofer One: Soderbergh’s “Kimi” (2022) and “Magic Mike’s Last Stand” (2023)

In 2012, when Steven Soderbergh announced his retirement, I scratched my head and figured that it isn’t like he hadn’t been prolific or paid his dues or added to the process of how films are made. A little while later, he walked his comments back and said he was taking a sabbatical. That, too, is fair; well-deserved break and all that.

But it continues to amuse me that the following year, he came out with “Side Effects” and “Behind the Candelabra”, busied himself with producing “The Knick” series (as well as directing) in 2014 through 2015, as well as producing no less than three other films for other people, took another break, cranked out “Lucky Logan” in 2017, another series (“Mosaic”) and “Unsane” both in 2018, produced a couple of other flicks for other people, and I’m sure I could keep going, but you get the gist: Soderbergh keeps himself busy and at a glance, this means something like two features a year not always, the two under discussion are about a year apart.

There’s also his M.O. of filming a crowd-pleaser like “Ocean’s Eleven” and following it with a more experimental film like “Bubble.” One for Hollywood, one for Stevie, as it were. A case could be made, though, that even his more popular films are rife with innovation and often visual narrative techniques unlikely to be seen in standard studio productions. That may be less true now as more and more directors are willing to employ any number of approaches to tell a story that heretofore would have been the provenance of more “arty” (hold on, I spit up a little) films.

Where do we stand, though, with this year’s release “Magic Mike’s Last Dance” and “Kimi”, released last year? Of the two, “Magic Mike’s Last Dance” finds us in familiar terrain with Channing Tatum reprising his role as Mike Lane, stripper extraordinaire and Soderbergh very much in audience-pleasing mode in a way that I don’t recall seeing since, well, “Magic Mike”. “Kimi” is Soderbergh in his thriller mode paying homage to Hitchcock with the DNA of “Rear Window” is all over it, but so too is “The Conversation” and Antonioni’s “Blow-Up”. 

The remarkable and fun aspect of these is that Soderbergh is uniquely Soderbergh. His films don’t look or feel like anyone else’s. In lesser hands, “Magic Mike’s Last Dance” could have been the dreckiest of rom-coms (it is very far from that) and “Kimi” could have been an empty stylistic homage festooned with and fettered by nods to and the weight of better films of its kind.

That’s not to say either is a masterpiece, but neither are these lesser films; they’re both worthy additions to Soderbergh’s canon/legacy.

“Kimi” is a taut, suspense laden tale with a tightly wound protagonist at the center in the form of Zoe Kravitz, killing it again. She plays Angela, an agoraphobe during Covid lockdown in Seattle who works from home, monitoring records of the failed interactions of Kimi, an AI personal assistant device like Alexa. The company Amygdala has stoked controversy by employing human monitors to aid the AI in refining its responses. Angela scans audio files, and adjusts code in the API where error messages are captured. Easy peasy until one such file is that of a murder. 

This in itself is plenty to work with and Kravitz plays Angela with a crushing desire to be left alone while trying to connect with others (she has a kind of boyfriend/friend with benefits in Terry (Byron Byers)). Her demeanor is on the prickly side of a sliding scale that would read as misanthropic were it not for the context of her agoraphobia which was brought on by an assault and exacerbated by the pandemic lockdown.

An additional element is that Amygdala is going public and someone is sweating Bradley Hasling, the CEO for money just before the IPO. The assailant in the sound file is “Brad” and yes, it’s not a spoiler to point out that the two are one and the same. 

There is a lot in the movie that you might want to frame as conventional or predictable, but the execution keeps the viewer off-balance. Much revolves around Kravitz as Angela and her predicament and how or if she will get out of it alive. If there is a familiarity to the proceedings above and beyond the nods to others in the genre, it’s that David Koepp’s screenplay finds him very much in his “Panic Room” mode, a film I didn’t particularly care for but that kept me going for the performances. Same here: there are levels to Angela that come out over the film’s brisk running time and once she ventures outside, her growth is exponential and unforced.

Normally, I find my eyes rolling way too hard for the sockets to contain them when a character somehow overcomes her obstacles too easily but Soderbergh keeps the sense of confinement and claustrophobia going even when Angela is outside her apartment. As with “Unsane”, to recall a similar Kafkaesque set-up, the camera angles are sharp and eccentric. With the earlier film, these were accentuated from the film being shot on an iPhone. Here, though, we’re often viewing Angela from similarly extreme angles, but isolated. Even when there are others in frame, Angela is the point of focus, standing out uncomfortably even when other characters encroach on her space. 

As with “Panic Room”, Koepp’s script borders on the clumsy, but not as badly as, say, his script for “Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull”. A fair amount of Koepp’s work tends to peter out, but that’s not really the case here; it just shifts gears into more of an action thriller when Angeles is drugged and brought back to her apartment by Bradley’s (and by extension, Amygdala’s) security team. The last quarter of the movie is an adrenaline rush, even if it’s not completely convincing.

It is, as usual with Soderbergh, a great looking film. Once again doing double duty as cinematographer under the nom de plume Peter Andrews, colors are saturated and shadows deep and rich in interior shots. When Angela is able to get out of her apartment to meet with a higher up at the office to discuss what to do with the data, the shift to daylight and the sharpness of the video (Soderbergh, like Lynch, just knows how to make video breathe…stunning) underscores and propels the action as much as the content of the scenes where Angela is being pursued. Then we return to dark at the denouement. 

As I mentioned, it’s a fleet flick and despite the way Angela treats the people around her (poor Terry…), the context of why she does so softens our reactions to her over the course of the movie. We are on her side, despite it all.

As for “Magic Mike’s Last Stand”, what a treat. I had low to no expectations when I saw the trailers and all I could think is that no one showed them to Soderbergh. They reduced a really fun film to mind-numbing, aspirational rom-com tropes of vomitous dimension. It’s as if the marketing department decided to take several lines of dialog, repurpose them to sound like a Hallmark TV special, and bleed all charisma out of Channing Tatum and Salma Hayek Pinault. And that takes some doing.

Admittedly, there is, at the bottom of it all, a pretty hokey, “let’s put on a show” vibe to the whole thing, but that’s precisely the charm of the film and again, it’s Soderbergh. It’s not going to be a conventional Sandra Bullock laugh-weep-laugh run. Which is not to say that it’s without heart. Holy cow, this little joint has lots of it.

The story in broad strokes is Mike lost his moving company during the pandemic and has turned to bartending for a caterer to get back on his feet. At a particularly swanky fundraiser, he meets Salma’s Max, a soon to be divorced social butterfly who finds out that Mike was once “Magic Mike” and gets him to perform for her. Normally, this shit would have me running for the exits or busting a gut laughing, but somehow, I’m sold. None of this should work, but it does, and naturally, they wind up in bed and that even makes sense. 

Then we go into high “Pygmalion” gear as Max is convinced that Mike had a gift that the world needs to experience and she has a theater in London that has been running a Jane Austen style comedy of manners for far too long. Retooling the play as a burlesque with male strippers would serve two purposes; getting Mike out there/sharing her experience with the world and as a big FU to her to her philandering husband (who is about to take everything from her). 

All the-show-must-go-on beats are here; the heart strings plucked when Max and Mike bicker, the tension between Max and her daughter, the camaraderie among the players, and yes, the one night only show is a resounding success and Max is broke at the end of it all, but Mike is there for her.

Sounds awful. It so very much is not. Soderbergh keeps things flowing at a nice clip, no scene feels overlong or drawn out and Hayek Pinault and Tatum are too gorgeous not to be able to sell the silliness. There is some pretty dim-witted dialog along the way, but I can’t help but feel that everyone knows it’s dimwitted and is later offset by some genuinely shrewd writing and character turns. 

The script by Reid Carolin may or may not eclipse the first Magic Mike movie, but he’s got a definite sene of where he wants the story to go and how to get there. I’m not sure I see the criticism of the film as cynical as valid; if anything, it feels pretty earnest to me. I wonder if self-awareness is being conflated with “knowing derision” of a beloved character. Whatever the case, I confess that while I understand that Mike is a kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy, and I do understand that this outing isn’t as fun as the first two, but it’s not without considerable charms and frankly, makes for a fitting conclusion to the franchise.

Once again, Soderbergh is cinematographer and editor and that accounts for how the film zips along. If the sense that everything’s going to work out in the end undercuts the drama or lowers the dramatic stakes, well, hell; isn’t that the case most of the time? I’m not the biggest fan of the genre, but when it comes to the last minute save and the boy and the girl getting together and persevering against the odds, you kind of know what you’re in for.

I suppose this could have gone in a different direction; Max goes broke and Mike leaves, but that would be a) a bummer and b) out of tune with the rest of the piece.

I’m glad “Magic Mike’s Last Dance” got theatrical release. It should be seen on the big screen; there’s plenty of eye candy (and I don’t just mean bodies) but I’m mystified why “Kimi” went to straight to streaming since I think it would gain from being seen with an audience. I’d love to hear what people might say when Angela finally steels herself and goes out into the world or when Kevin, a concerned neighbor entrees the scene (much to his chagrin). 

While neither of these are Soderbergh masterworks, they’re both great fun and I think should be taken as such. This is basically my baseline for most films. I don’t need depth, profundity, or even high artistry to enjoy a flick; sometimes a tense little thriller with corporate malfeasance and murder on its mind or a last minute show to save the day and bring two people together is all I need.

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